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A few weeks ago, I realized I had wasted my life, that I was in the wrong profession.

A guy in the chimney business was inspecting work his company had done on a neighbour’s house. Because he’d been to my place two years ago, and I’d recommended him to my neighbour, we’d stopped to chat.

Being Canadians, the first topic of conversation was the weather. “Can’t beat this year,” I said. “Here it is November and it’s still summer.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but it’s going to get cold soon, and I won’t be here when it does. In fact, before long, I’ll be sipping a long, cool, Tom Collins on the balcony of our condo in Sarasota. I hate the winter; I hate the cold. Thirty years ago, we started driving to Florida for the winter. Siesta Key, right on the Gulf (of Mexico). We go Dec. 1, and come back in April. The only snow and ice I see is on television, when there’s something on the news.”

I listened to this guy and started feeling sorry for myself. For the last hundred years or so, give or take a decade here and there, I have been employed by newspapers. I’ve gone to work at midnight and at 6 in the morning. Yes, I sometimes worked 9-to-5, but not often. I worked on all the statutory holidays — Christmas Day being the toughest. The maximum I’ve ever been able to take for vacation has been two weeks, which doesn’t give you a lot of time to escape the winter. I came to the conclusion that I would have been way better off building chimneys for a living.

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Like that guy, I hate the winter. When I was a kid, and didn’t know better, I thought it was terrific. I played hockey on the road and went tobogganing. Then I grew up, which was at about age 14. There had been a big storm, and my father wanted me to shovel the driveway. My sister was already out. “Hurry up,” she said. “We can finish this fast and then have a snowball fight. It will be such fun.” And I said, after sticking my nose out into the -20 C air: “Are you crazy?” I have worked hard ever since to avoid going outside.

I have employed numerous tricks over the years to pretend it isn’t winter. I went through a period when it was particularly cold out to put the thermostat up to 80 F and watch a videotape of that year’s Masters golf tournament. It was toasty warm inside the house and through the miracle of colour television and a VCR, I could be in Augusta, Ga., in shirt sleeves. That would work until my wife would send me to the store for milk, or something, and I’d have to bundle up and go outside. Brrrrr.

One year, when I was writing a column, and stuck for something to say about anything in the middle of February, I decided to declare Summer in the City Day. I wrote that on the following Wednesday, everybody was to go to work in Bermuda shorts and short sleeves. One bank — a branch of Canada Trust — and one radio station went along with the gag. Everybody else thought I was nuts, particularly when I walked around town the whole day without a topcoat and wearing my Don Johnson Miami Vice white suit and a pink shirt. And two pairs of thermal underwear underneath. I mean, it was really cold.

Another time, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I wrote that I planned to build a sandbox in the basement and hang a sun lamp from the ceiling. Then we’d put on our bathing suits and go down and pretend we were in Hawaii. I told my wife, and she said she was saving my columns because it would make it that much easier for her to have me committed some day.

For the last couple of years, we would get up really early on Christmas Day and go out to Pearson and fly down to Fort Myers where a guy would pick us up and take us even further south to a hotel in downtown Naples, Fla. We would have Christmas dinner on Fifth Ave., followed by ice cream cones for dessert. For five days, we would walk around with not much on. Then we would fly home and get sick with pneumonia.

Now, I’m plotting how I can continue to do what I do without having to hang around this part of the world between about now and the first of next May. I figure with email, text messaging, Skype, Twitter, Instagram and other tools of instant communication that I could do what I do pretty much anywhere in the world, but particularly Phoenix, Ariz. In fact, there’s no reason for anybody who works in an office to actually have to report to a central workplace any longer, for those reasons. But I digress.

What got me thinking about the paragraph above was something that came to me in the mail the other day. It’s my annual copy of Along Interstate-75, ex-CFRB broadcaster Dave Hunter’s “must-have” guide for anybody thinking of driving from Toronto through Detroit to Florida and back again.

If I am going to exchange the Frozen North for the Sunny South, I can’t take everything I would need for three or four months on a plane. So, I would have to drive, and this annual travel book, available at CAA Ontario offices as well as Indigo and Chapters (and online at Indigo.ca and Amazon), is indispensable.

Now, I know there are other routes to Florida. Doug Wighton, a retired high school teacher from Mississauga, wrote some highly entertaining stories for Toronto Star Wheels several years ago about a route that went more north-south (I-79 / I-77 / I-26 / I-95 / I-4) than the westerly south I-75.

But, so far as I know, Mr. Wighton hasn’t published a book about his route, and the latest Along Interstate-75 is Mr. Hunter’s 19th. Ergo, he wins — this time.

The thing I like best about I-75 — and, yes, I have driven to Florida and back a number of times — is that once you get on it, you can stay on it all the way to Florida, unlike some other routes that require some jogging around to get from one road to another. Having said that, there are all sorts of hidden gems — monuments, displays — along the I-75 that, if you have the time, are delightful to visit and only a short drive away. Hunter describes them all, and in great detail.

The other thing is that, if you are anything like me, you make an awful lot of plans but often don’t follow through with them. For example, I have 10 years of Men’s Health magazines in my house. I read that magazine religiously and make lists of exercise programs and diets I plan to follow. Anybody who has seen me lately knows that I am, as the cowboys say, “All hat and no cattle.” Translation 1: “All talk and no action.” Translation 2: Still fat.

I suspect this will be the case with Dave Hunter’s 19th edition of Along Interstate-75. It is highly unlikely I will be going anywhere this winter — for any length of time, in any event — and will have to suffer through the snow and cold with the rest of you at least one more time.

But that might not be a bad thing, either. If I don’t get to drive to Florida, at least I’ll get to go in my mind, and Along Interstate-75 is the perfect vehicle for doing just that.

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